| Body | I have the privilege of working with the Pakanapul Language Team in the area of Lake Isabella, California. Every spring Whiskey Flats Days, a historical reenactment festival, takes place in nearby Kernville. We wanted to talk about Whiskey Flats Days, but realized that we didn’t have the necessary vocabulary. To develop our vocabulary, we played a game commonly known as Salad Bowl.
Mode: Interpersonal Communication
Learning Objectives:
- Students will be able to use circumlocution and non-verbal cues to communicate ideas that they don’t know the vocabulary for.
- Students will develop and use vocabulary around a specific topic.
Materials Needed: notecards with target vocabulary words written on then in English (or other dominant language), bowl to draw cards from, timer
Procedure:
- Draft a list of the vocabulary that you anticipate you and your students will need to talk about a chosen topic. In our Whiskey Flats Days example, we had the following: parade, team roping, barrel racing, rodeo, concert, band, kids’ games, gunfight, actor, play (theater), carnival, encampment, costume contest, mayor, charity, car show.
- Write one English word or phrase on each note card. Fold the notecards and put them into a bowl.
- Divide class into two teams. A person from Team A will have one minute to get his/her teammates to guess as many cards as possible, drawing a new card from the bowl as soon as teammates say the word. After a minute, a person from Team B will have a turn with his/her own teammates. Once all of the cards have been drawn from the bowl, tally up to see how many cards each team guessed during that round.
- There are three rounds.
- Round 1: Taboo. The person drawing cards speaks only in the target language (no English) to describe the word on the card.
- Round 2: Charades. Put all of the cards back in the bowl, and mix them up. The person drawing the cards must act out the English word or phrase. This will be easier because both teams now know what all of the cards in the bowl are.
- Round 3: Single Word or Gesture. Again put all of the cards back in the bowl. This time the person drawing the cards is limited to a single word or gesture.
- Now that everyone is familiar with the new vocabulary to be explored and has seen some ideas for circumlocution or description, as a whole group discuss how you can say each word or phrase in the target language. If possible arrive at a consensus for how you will say it. Our group put the new target language words on post-its in a section of the room and left it there for a certain amount of time so that people could provide anonymous feedback, make other suggestions, etc. Then the words were re-visited before being adopted as our shared way to talk about these new things.
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